Emotional Intelligence: The Leadership Skill Too Many Learn Too Late

Written by: Michael Huff

Many high performers become leaders because they excel at leading themselves, but struggle when faced with the new dynamic of leading others. The challenge is that many new leaders are unaware of the leadership skills they lack until problems begin to surface. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) training helps leaders manage themselves, understand others, and build trust, three things that directly impact team success.

This article is less about defining EQ and more about helping you use it in everyday life. When you improve your EQ, the benefits extend far beyond the workplace. You communicate better in relationships, respond with more patience to loved ones, and lead more effectively. Who doesn’t want that?

What Emotional Intelligence Really Means at Work

Daniel Goleman defines Emotional intelligence as “How well we handle ourselves and our relationships, and the four domains.”

• Self-awareness – How well do you recognize your moods, what sets you off, and what are your patterns?
• Self-regulation – How good are you at controlling impulses before reacting?
• Social awareness – When it comes to others, how accurate are you at reading emotions and team dynamics?
• Relationship management – How effective are you at building trust, navigating conflict, and influencing interactions productively? This is less about positional authority and more about being the type of leader people want to follow.

Have you ever stopped yourself from saying something you knew you shouldn’t? Well done! That’s you practicing emotional intelligence. Without EQ development, leaders often have to unnecessarily navigate the common pitfalls of frontline leadership, which can break trust, strain relationships, and create more work than necessary.

If no one teaches leaders how to regulate frustration, navigate conflict, read team dynamics, or coach people under pressure, they will learn on the fly. And when leaders learn EQ through trial and error, other people often pay the price.

I’ve been hung up on, sworn at, swung at (he missed), and called names I’m embarrassed to repeat. I’ve seen plenty of people fail to practice emotional intelligence, and there have been times when I’ve been guilty of it myself. I fell short just this week when someone talked over me on a Teams call. There are many additional examples I could share, but one instance comes to mind that I wish I had handled better.

I confronted an indirect report about a performance issue in the hallway in front of other employees.  What began as an inquiry quickly turned into an inquisition. He got heated, I got heated. We both recognized it, yet neither of us stopped, and soon it became a shouting match in the hallway. We were like two dogs barking at one another.

He took the matter to HR, and mediation followed. Even if I was correct about the performance issue, it didn’t matter anymore because I had failed to regulate my emotions. That happened more than a decade ago, and it still bothers me. History can be an effective teacher.

A common misconception about emotional intelligence is that it’s about being nice or soft. In reality, it is one of the most practical skills a leader can develop. That is good news because, unlike personality traits that may be deeply ingrained, emotional intelligence can be strengthened with awareness and practice. It all starts with the first component of EQ: knowing yourself.

Knowing Yourself Helps You Lead Others

I have a confession to make. I struggle with imposter syndrome. Don’t worry, it’s not fatal. If you aren’t familiar with it, imposter syndrome is the feeling that you don’t deserve success, that you aren’t good enough, and that your internal monologue is a steady stream of negative self-talk. Imposter syndrome often shows up despite evidence to the contrary. I’m sharing this because how I saw myself wasn’t how others saw me.

Aristotle said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Here are a couple of tools to help you better understand yourself.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Many of us have a cognitive bias that leads us to either underestimate or overestimate ourselves. This bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Craig Groeschel notes, “People with low competence tend to overestimate their ability.” He goes on to say, “There’s people that are highly competent, and they underestimate their expertise.” In other words, poor self-awareness can distort confidence in both directions. Knowing yourself is not thinking too highly or too poorly of yourself. It is seeing yourself accurately.

The Johari Window

Another helpful model for self-awareness is the Johari Window. It helps leaders understand that there are things we know about ourselves, things others know about us that we don’t, things we hide, and areas still undiscovered.

For leaders, this matters because blind spots often create more problems than bad intentions. You may believe you are clear, approachable, calm, or empowering, while others experience something very different.

	Known to others	Not known to others
Known to self	Open Area Strengths, style, habits everyone sees	Hidden Area Stress, doubts, insecurities, motives you keep private
Not known to self	Blind Spot Behaviors that others notice but you miss	Unknown Area Untapped potential or hidden barriers

 

The goal of the Johari Window is not perfection. It is awareness. The more you understand how you are perceived, the more effectively you can lead. Many struggling leaders spend too much time assuming they are operating in the open area when they are actually leading from blind spots.

That is why feedback matters. Trusted peers, mentors, coaches, and team members can help reveal what you cannot see on your own.

Self-Assessments

A good assessment creates a mirror. It gives leaders a chance to pause, reflect, and honestly evaluate how they are showing up day to day.

Our Frontline Leadership Self-Assessment & Reflection Tool gives supervisors a structured way to examine behaviors that directly influence trust, engagement, accountability, and team performance.

The value of self-assessment is not in scoring yourself perfectly. It is in identifying patterns, recognizing blind spots, and starting better conversations with managers or mentors. And that leads to the next challenge. Many people understand the concepts of emotional intelligence but struggle to apply them in real time. Knowing yourself matters. The next step is managing yourself when pressure hits.

From Knowing Yourself to Managing Yourself

It is one thing to learn about EQ and self-awareness, but it’s another thing to put them into practice when you are frustrated, disrespected, rushed, or under pressure. That is where self-regulation separates knowledge from leadership.

Most advice about self-regulation is helpful and worth repeating. Get enough sleep. Manage your stress. Know your triggers. Pause before reacting. Take a breath. Go for a walk. All of those habits matter. But one of the most overlooked tools is reflection.

In our three-day leadership training, we often ask participants a simple question: When was the last time you lost your cool at work? That question usually unlocks a story and common ground. Once the event is on the table, we walk through it. What happened? Why did it trigger you? What outcome were you hoping for? What would you do differently next time? That process helps leaders learn from the moment rather than simply regret it.

I can use my own example from last week. I got frustrated during a call when I was talked over. The better question is not just, ‘Why did that annoy me?’ The better question is what that was really about. Did I feel dismissed? Was I already stressed? Was I carrying frustration from something earlier in the day? Reflection helped me uncover that the feeling of being disrespected is one of my triggers.

Most leaders already know some of the situations that test them. Maybe it is the weekly meeting where tension always rises. Maybe it is one employee who constantly complains. Maybe it is being challenged publicly, dealing with last-minute changes, or feeling ignored. Once you identify the pattern, you can prepare yourself before walking into it. That is emotional intelligence in practice.

Recently, tornado alerts went off several times in our area. That alert was our cue that something serious might be coming, and it was time to prepare ourselves and protect others. Triggers at work can function the same way. If you know a certain meeting, person, or situation tends to pull you into the red zone, let that awareness be your alert. Prepare before the storm hits.

There was a time I ran 13.1 miles without stopping.  Yes, that .1 matters, and I have a sticker to prove it. Running that far and for that long wasn’t possible on day one. It started with sixty seconds of running followed by walking. Over time, with preparation, repetition, and consistency, the distance grew. Self-regulation works the same way. You do not become composed under pressure because you read about EQ once. You build it through practice.

Too many leaders only think about emotional intelligence after they lose their cool. Strong leaders prepare, reflect, and practice before the next moment arrives.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence Through Relationships

If you want to strengthen relationships with your team, focus on building trust, creating psychological safety, asking better questions, and living your values consistently.

A leader can understand emotional intelligence in theory, know their triggers, and even manage themselves well under pressure. But if the people around them feel dismissed, tense, ignored, or reluctant to speak, something is still missing. Employee problems are often visible before they are verbal. Seeing that requires floor presence. Practicing visible leadership helps you notice changes in tone, energy, and participation.

This is where social awareness and relationship management converge. Social awareness is the ability to read the room. It is noticing when morale is slipping, when frustration is building, when someone seems checked out, or when a normally engaged employee has gone quiet. Relationship management is what you do with that awareness.

Many leaders make the mistake of assuming quiet means everything is fine. It often does not. Sometimes quiet means people do not feel heard and no longer believe speaking up matters. When employees disengage like this, you’ll get compliance, but you won’t get commitment.

We spend significant time in leadership development discussing psychological safety because it’s a leader’s secret weapon for understanding a team. Employees who feel psychologically safe share concerns, admit mistakes, challenge bad ideas, and offer suggestions. Without it, problems stay hidden longer, resentment grows, and relationships fizzle.

Leaders with strong EQ ask questions, preferably open-ended ones. They invite input and listen with curiosity, not judgment. How you respond either builds trust or breaks it.

Building a Leadership Legacy Through EQ

At the end of the day, employees may forget some of what you said, but they will remember how it felt to work for you. That is why emotional intelligence is not soft. It shapes culture, performance, retention, and the kind of leader people choose to follow. Picture your employees around the dinner table with their families. Now ask yourself, in seven words or fewer, how would they describe you as a leader?